Category Archives: History

President, Or King?

SCOTUS is going to review the “take care” clause. This is huge, and a potential opportunity to finally rein in a tyrannical executive.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More at the WaPo from Fred Barbash:

In the view of Texas and others, Obama admitted both that he had no power under the law and that he thus, in his words, “changed the law” while pretending that he wasn’t. Bad faith.

“There generally wouldn’t be any evidence of bad faith,” Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett, who formulated the winning Commerce Clause argument in the Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act, said in an interview. “But here we have public declarations [from Obama] that ‘I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the authority’ and that ‘Congress won’t act, Congress won’t act, Congress won’t act’ and then you also have the enactment of what looks like legal rules, not just discretion, but whole classes of people who are exempt from the law, the very same law the president was urging Congress to pass….it suggests that he’s not acting in good faith.”

You don’t say.

History, And Consensus

Judith Curry has found an interesting paper:

The participation of historians in the climate debate is critical. This is a topic that I am extremely interested in, and we have all been highly appreciative of the original posts by Tony Brown, at CE and also at WUWT.

Apart from the eloquent comment sense in this Jenkins’ essay, he raises the issue of the Goldilocks Principle – what climate do we want? Does anyone want the cold miserable climate of the 17th and 18th centuries? I’m not even sure we want the climate of the 1930’s or 1950’s. Historians have a huge role to play in articulating what constitutes a desirable climate, both regionally and globally.

Yes, the easiest way to stump a warm monger is to ask them what the ideal climate is, what is the magic year we want to return to?

The Administrative State

Time to blow it up:

A smaller government would mean fewer phony-baloney jobs for college graduates with few marketable skills but demonstrated political loyalty. It would mean fewer opportunities for tax dollars to be directed to people and entities with close ties to people in power. It would mean less ability to engage in social engineering and “nudges” aimed at what are all-too-often seen as those dumb rubes in flyover country. The smaller the government, the fewer the opportunities for graft and self-aggrandizement — and graft and self-aggrandizement are what our political class is all about.

A more accountable government would be, in some ways, an even greater nightmare. Right now, when the federal government screws up, people often don’t find out — look at how the IRS and the State Department have stonewalled efforts to find out what happened with the Tea Party audits or the Benghazi debacle — and even when word gets out, it’s rare that anybody loses their job. (The EPA knew that Flint, Michigan’s water was toxic for months and didn’t tell anyone. Will there be consequences? Doubtful.)

Most of the time, the bureaucracy acts without any real oversight from Congress, or from the public. It’s able to enact political agendas that, if put to an open vote, would never pass. And to the bureaucracy’s supporters, that’s not a bug, but a feature.

It is indeed.

“We Want Our Safety Back”

Women protest their insane government in Cologne.

As I noted on Twitter yesterday, this was the biggest mass rape of German women since the Soviets invaded.

[Update Saturday afternoon]

This seems related somehow: Swedish women request segregated jacuzzis, due to being groped. It seems to be a recent problem, for some reason that just has me scratching my head.

[Sunday-morning update]

Another report of hundreds of “Arabic” men attacking women on New Years Eve.

Nope, nothing coordinated about this at all.

[Update Sunday afternoon]

Why we can’t remain silent about the Cologne assaults:

Street sexual violence is also—obviously—not exclusive to Arab and Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, among the worst offenders is Papua New Guinea, where two-thirds of women are subjected to some kind of physical or sexual violence, and rapists from “raskol” gangs are happy to pose for photos after their latest rape.

Having said that, what is infuriating and totally counterproductive is to deny that a specifically cultural problem around immigration patterns and European sexual norms has been steadily rising across the continent. To pretend this is not the case only further stigmatizes us brown Muslim men. That the problem requires attention is clear.

German police unions and women’s right groups have recently accused authorities of underplaying cases of rape at refugee shelters. “There is a lot of glossing over going on. But this doesn’t represent reality,” police union chief Rainer Wendt told Reuters. Henry Ove Berg, who was a police chief during Norway’s recent spike in rape cases, said, “people from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a miniskirt, only in a burqa… when they get to Norway, something happens in their heads.” He added that “there was a link but not a very clear link” between the rape cases in Norway and immigrants. Hanne Kristin Rohde, former head of the violent crime section of the Oslo Police Department, was criticized in 2011 when she went public with data suggesting that immigrants committed a hugely disproportionate number of rapes. “This was a big problem… but it was difficult to talk about,” she remarked. There was “a clear statistical connection between sexual violence and male migrants.”

Any solution to this emerging issue must simultaneously seek to deny the far right the ammunition it desires while preserving Europe’s hard-earned progressive social values.
This is all controversial, but it must be said. Anecdotal attitudes point to the same conclusion. Abdu Osman Kelifa, an Eritrean asylum seeker to Norway, recently told The New York Times that in his home country, “if someone wants a lady, he can just take her and he will not be punished.” He confessed that it was still hard for him to accept that a woman could accuse her husband of rape.

Between denying the problem and using it to fuel bigoted far-right rhetoric, an approach grounded in data and a level head is vital. Any solution to this emerging issue must simultaneously seek to deny the far right the ammunition it desires while preserving—not reneging on—Europe’s hard-earned progressive social values.

I hope it’s not too late.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Western Spring:

The tension between the forces of political correctness and the pent-up forces of repressed cultural traditions is now bursting like a spring wound up beyond containment. Things may start slowly at first but ramp up rapidly, mirroring Cornelius Ryan’s famous description of the Berlin Philharmonic’s last performance as the Red Army stood at the gates of Berlin.

…Seventy years later, the question facing people caught in the middle is where to run. There is nowhere obvious. In Europe, Ross Douthat argues, all exits are temporarily blocked. The left has destroyed the middle, leaving only a choice of extremes. “Just last week Merkel rejected a proposal to cap refugee admissions (which topped one million last year) at 200,000 in 2016.”

…Everywhere one looks the matches are being lit. The sudden outburst of resistance comes the end of what Jonah Goldberg called “a bad day” for the Narrative. A bad sequence of decades since 2001, more like it.

These will be the worst days for Europe in seventy years, I’m afraid. As he notes, the Constitution may save us, but it doesn’t help that the left has trampled all over it for a century, and continue to do so.

[Update a while later]

Sex crimes across Germany. The cover up unravels.

#SciTech2016

I’ve been at the SciTech2016 conference in San Diego (drove down from LA this morning ahead of most of the rain). Posting will probably remain light until tomorrow afternoon or Thursday, when I get back to the office.

I should say, though, that Bill Anders was very politically incorrect in the plenary session this morning. He was basically singing from my hymnal, about the obsession with safety, and Apollo not being about space, and he had unkind words to say about Orion, with a poor young woman from the program sitting on the dais with him (it was pretty funny when Ann Sulkosky and another Lockmart guy came up to him afterwards to gently remonstrate with him). It was particularly hilarious, because they’re the primary sponsor of the conference; there was a big Lockmart logo above them.

I introduced myself, and gave him a copy of the book. He said he’d read it (future tense), and I hope he does. It’s nice to run into an Apollo astronaut who’s thinking in 21st-century terms. He said Elon was on his poop list (he used a different word) because he was one of the few Apollo guys who had stood up for him against Cunningham and Cernan, but Elon had stood him up for lunch. I don’t think Apollo astronauts are used to being stood up for lunch.

Why Leftist Men Treat Women Worse

It’s because they let them get away with it.

But then, the misogyny of the Left goes back decades.

[Update a while later]

I will not stop talking about this. Good for you, Kat.

I’d never actually seen such a complete list of the women that Bill (and Hillary) Clinton abused.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sex, lies, Clinton and Trump:

times have changed and morality with it. I don’t think Bill, and certainly Hillary, would want Juanita Broaddrick brought up at a time when, on our campuses, even an unwanted kiss is legally considered rape, thanks to Title IX. Can you imagine how many instances of what is called “unwanted touching” could come out of the woodwork now if Bill started to pick a fight with Trump? It’s hard to imagine Clinton making it through Georgetown or Yale Law under today’s rules, or even through his freshman year.

And he got away with raping that young woman at Oxford.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mark Steyn: A tale of two Bills.”